Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 6, 2008

Better Answers in Ask.com

Ask.com went back to its roots and enhanced the snippets for search results if the query is a question. Snippets are usually excerpts that include your query, but Ask.com replaced them with the actual answers, as you can see if you search for [how to tie a tie]:

"Presenting direct answers to your searches, front and center, has always been at the heart of the Ask.com experience, and we push further down that path today with the introduction of three new answer technologies: DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm. These technologies take both structured and unstructured data, and - instead of delivering a title and description for each document - they deliver answers," explains Ask's blog. This is a clever idea, but Ask.com only shows at most 2 results with enhanced snippets.

The new feature is part of a broader update that mixes specialized search results with organic web results, much like Google's universal search. Ask.com goes one step further and almost eliminates standard, as you can see if you search for [Madonna]: in the top 10 results, you can find 4 web search results, one direct answer, image results, news results, event listings, video results and an encyclopedia result.

17 comments:

I always liked the way Ask.com showed me search results. Left and right sidebars with snippets of info on the right and refining my search options on the left. It seems they are done with that and came up with the same Google and Yahoo like display of results. They have lost their uniqueness. I won't be interested in using Ask.com from now on. I can go to Google which does a better job than anyone else and keeps it simple.

Unfortunately, ask.com continues to have outdated search results. I continue to find search results that link to sites which no longer exist months to years later. Similar searches on other search engines do not yield similar incorrect results. Ask.com is just not crawling the web. Stick a fork in them--they are done.

my name is noemy, recently i bought a dell laptop M1530 and its making noise and heats up. i called dell, they sent an upgrade hard drive, and that one is no better.then i sent it to dell for repair, came back the same. i called dell back and asked them for an exchange. they said they can only repair it because it over 21 days. don't forget this a brand new lap, not a refurbish. they made me stay on line for 4 hrs and spoke to 16 agents who kept on troubleshooting the machine. then i chat for 2hrs with a supervisor. i need dell to fix is customers problems. it's unfair to pay so much money for a damage product and being force to keep it to. tell me what you think?

I hate it. I am not computer literate and don't know how it got here but I can't get it to leave. usually in Google I don't have to type in the .com to go where I want. With ask.com I am continually going back to the address bar to retype my address with the .com. I am sick of it and just want my google back.